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pythonsql

Python list in SQL query as parameter

I have a Python list, say

l = [1,5,8]

I want to write a SQL query to get the data for all the elements of the list, say

select name from students where id = |IN THE LIST l|

How do I accomplish this?

Solution

  • Answers so far have been templating the values into a plain SQL string. That's absolutely fine for integers, but if we wanted to do it for strings we get the escaping issue.

    Here's a variant using a parameterised query that would work for both:

    placeholder= '?' # For SQLite. See DBAPI paramstyle.
placeholders= ', '.join(placeholder for unused in l)
query= 'SELECT name FROM students WHERE id IN (%s)' % placeholders
cursor.execute(query, l)